It is with much regret that your columnist Russell Youll (The Way I See It, August 4) fails to differentiate between those of us who work for local government (i.e. the council) and the public sector (i.e. NHS staff, teachers and the civil service) and propagates this idea that nurses and street cleaners have gold-plated pensions.

We in local government are in a self-financing pension scheme (LGPS) totally paid for by our own contributions and those of our employers. We are not subsidised.

We recently increased our own pension contributions where we pay between six per cent to eight per cent of our monthly wage into our own scheme.

The average pension paid to members in the Local Government Pension Scheme is some £5,000 per year. I do not believe that it is helpful when Russell comments on issues that it would appear he does not wish to understand, so as to perpetuate this myth that the citizens and workers in Coventry have the most obliging pension in the country worth tens of thousands of pounds a year.